Joe Biden announced on Monday that he is commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their sentences to life in prison just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump, an outspoken supporter of expanding capital punishment, takes office.
The decision spares the lives of those convicted of killings, including those of police and military officers, people on federal land, those involved in deadly bank robberies or drug deals, and guards or prisoners in federal facilities.
This means that only three federal inmates are still facing execution. They are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist murders of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history.
“I’ve dedicated my career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” Biden said in his statement. “Today, I commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates to life without the possibility of parole.
These commutations are in line with my administration’s moratorium on federal executions in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
In 2021, the Biden administration announced a moratorium on federal capital punishment to study the protocols used, effectively suspending executions during Biden’s term.
However, Biden had previously promised to go even further on the issue, pledging to end federal executions without regard for terrorism or hate-motivated mass killings.
While running for president in 2020, Biden stated on his campaign website that he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.”
Similar language did not appear on Biden’s reelection website before he dropped out of the presidential race in July.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” the vice president’s press release read.
“But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vice president, and now president, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
He made a political jab at Trump, saying, “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
Trump, who takes office on January 20, has frequently discussed expanding executions. In a speech announcing his 2024 campaign, Trump called for those “caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts.”
He later promised to execute drug and human smugglers, and praised China’s harsher treatment of drug dealers. During his first term as president, Trump also supported the death penalty for drug dealers.
During Trump’s first term, there were 13 federal executions, the most by any president in modern history, and some of them may have occurred quickly enough to contribute to the spread of the coronavirus at the federal death row facility in Indiana.
These were the first federal executions since 2003. The final three took place after Election Day in November 2020, but before Trump left office the following January, marking the first time a lame-duck president executed federal prisoners since Grover Cleveland in 1889.
Advocacy groups have recently pressured Biden to take action to make it more difficult for Trump to use capital punishment for federal inmates.
Bianca Jagger, a Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, wrote to Mr Biden last week, urging him to grant reprieves to those on death row.
In a letter seen only by The Independent, Ms Jagger wrote: “The death penalty is unfair, arbitrary, and capricious, frequently based on jurisprudence riddled with racial discrimination and judicial bias.”
“State-sponsored murder has no place in 21st-century society. With only about one month remaining in your presidency, you have a limited opportunity to leave a lasting legacy.
The sanctity of life is a cornerstone of moral and ethical governance that compels us to act against the irreversible punishment of death.”
The president’s announcement also comes less than two weeks after he commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and of 39 others convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.
The announcement also followed the post-election pardon that Biden granted his son Hunter on federal gun and tax charges after long saying he would not issue one, sparking an uproar in Washington.
The pardon also raised questions about whether he would issue sweeping preemptive pardons for administration officials and other allies who the White House worries could be unjustly targeted by Trump’s second administration.
Speculation that Biden could commute federal death sentences intensified last week after the White House announced he plans to visit Italy on the final foreign trip of his presidency next month.
Biden, a practicing Catholic, will meet with Pope Francis, who recently called for prayers for U.S. death row inmates in hopes their sentences will be commuted.
Martin Luther King III, who publicly urged Biden to change the death sentences, said in a statement issued by the White House that the president “has done what no president before him was willing to do: take meaningful and lasting action not just to acknowledge the death penalty’s racist roots but also to remedy its persistent unfairness.”
Donnie Oliverio, a retired Ohio police officer whose partner was killed by one of the men whose death sentence was converted, said the execution of “the person who killed my police partner and best friend would have brought me no peace.”
“The president has done what is right here,” Oliverio said in a statement also issued by the White House, “and what is consistent with the faith he and I share.”